


Wutai Lullaby

by Ardwynna



Series: Marriageverse [6]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, War Crimes, ritual suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2016-09-13
Packaged: 2018-08-14 19:19:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8025871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ardwynna/pseuds/Ardwynna
Summary: Sephiroth's Cetra children answer a call he cannot hear. Retribution is waiting for his ancient crimes.





	Wutai Lullaby

There’s a cliff in Wutai Sephiroth won’t go near. Not if he can help it. He went once, before he knew what it meant, and he hasn’t dared go back since. They call it haunted. It probably is. He had not been raised to believe spiritual nonsense, but he’s seen enough now to know what’s not.

It is curiosity, and idleness, and their Cetra drive to explore that sends his children into the woods, up the high trail to the sharp fault. Beyond are distant rocks and the murderous sea. Of course a place full of spirits would draw them. Something on the wind is calling their names. He follows them. He has to. They’re young yet, easily led, and not as woodsworthy as they believe. 

The trees give out some two hours down the trail. The air is too thin, too dry, too cold, to support them. His lungs would burn if he were a normal man. But his children have pressed onwards so he must too. He takes to the air to sight them, to stop them, to bring them home. 

It is too late. They stand at cliff’s edge. Ten thousand drowned and battered souls have called. He swoops. He will catch them as they fall. 

But they do not. His daughter stops at the barest edge. A rock slides loose and falls, falls, vanishing from sight before it hits the waves. She stops and the others do as well. Sephiroth lands quietly. Startling them is the last thing he wants. 

It’s quiet, this high lonely cliff, at the end of a sacred, accursed path. Here ten thousand souls, or twice that even, met their end with a prayer, blood sacrifice doublefold for the safety of their land. The sun sets. The sea is aglow and the sky is aflame. His children are washed in golden light, their snowy hair tinted like the sun. 

There is no golden hair in Wutai, not any natural born. Eyes that are not black or brown are exceedingly rare. There are few born of mixed blood, even now, long after the war. Cultural precepts still hold strong, and the old wounds run so deep. Pain fades slowly, if at all. The cliff is a testament to grief. 

They died for honor, this cliff’s ghosts, ten thousand souls dishonored in war. Ten thousand ravished girls and the ones who were never born. For their honor, for their land, for revenge from beyond the grave, they pulled themselves up from torn rags and bloodied earth and walked, walked, and fell, to live, after the tradition of such things, at the bottom of the sea. 

Sephiroth reaches out, hand trembling. These three children, hoped for, wanted and born, how many with hair that would have been like theirs lie beneath the waves? Do they call their sister, their little brothers, from the ocean floor? 

Ella shifts, dancing at the edge. Sephiroth feels his heart sink. This cliff is haunted by guilt as much as souls. But she does not jump. She does not fall. If there is a call he cannot hear, she does not answer it. She walks back to him, her brothers following as they tend to do. 

“It’s nice up here,” she says, taking his hand. 

“Cold though,” says one twin, and the other hums a tune. It sounds like something Sephiroth might have heard once, long ago, soft and slow. The others join in, keeping harmony in that unthinking way of theirs. Ella pulls his hand and leads him towards the path. How many who climbed this way ever walked back down again? They might be the first in so many years.

He chokes in the thin air and feels around for his voice. “That’s… a pretty song,” he says, and means it. It brings to mind their mother, cradling them, singing to them the Cetra tunes of old. But this isn’t one of hers. 

“They taught it to us,” Rei says, “to remember them.”

Sephiroth casts one backwards glance to the haunted cliff and the deepening sky. “That… that was nice of them.” Vengeance comes in many forms, he has come to realize. His children will have questions someday. They will expect him to answer. He will, no holding back, when they are old enough. 

May it bring peace to those beneath the sea.


End file.
